{"id":475,"date":"2014-05-27T08:35:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-27T08:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/05\/in-todays-news-the-faa.html"},"modified":"2014-05-27T08:35:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-27T08:35:00","slug":"in-todays-news-the-faa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/05\/in-todays-news-the-faa.html","title":{"rendered":"In today’s news: the FAA"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
\u201cFAA\u2019s hiring diverts from recruit pipeline; Air traffic control jobs going to general public over college trainees<\/a>.\u201d<\/div>\n

That\u2019s the headline in today\u2019s Tribune. \u00a0The story: \u00a0after developing the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative Program in which college students prepare for traffic controller employment by majoring in the subject at college, some 25 years ago, the FAA abruptly changed approaches to hire from the general public \u2014 anyone with a high school diploma \u2014 instead. <\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, the first step in the hiring process is a biographical assessment, which only about 2,400 of the 28,000 applicants passed, so that large numbers of college graduates were excluded from hiring solely on this basis. \u00a0And this assessment looks to me to be a lot of pseudoscience. \u00a0The Tribune includes some sample questions:<\/p>\n

More classmates would remember me as:
humble.
dominant.\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The number of different high school sports I participated in was:
\u00a04 or More.
\u00a03.
\u00a02.
\u00a01.
\u00a0Didn\u2019t play sports.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They also cite a question on \u201cthe age at which the person started to earn money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which means that \u2014 almost certainly \u2014 the FAA is excluding large numbers of qualified candidates based on junk science (and I think that any claims that you can determine someone\u2019s future success in an occupation by their answers to such a personality test, are nothing other than junk science), and ignoring the qualifications of the college graduates in favor of some notion that they can find the candidates with the highest degree of aptitude.<\/p>\n

And why? \u00a0The FAA denies this, but the strong suspicion on the part of advocates for the collegiate programs and their students, is that this change has the intention of bumping up the number of minority hires. \u00a0(Correspondingly, the hiring process had favored military hires, so that eliminating this could boost the number of women.)<\/p>\n

And this is not just a matter of \u201cso what? \u00a0government policies just change over time.\u201d \u00a0The capriciousness of this change has, well, screwed over the recent graduates of and enrollees in these collegiate training programs, individuals who enrolled in good faith believing that there would be jobs for them. \u00a0Even if the FAA\u2019s research shows that the collegiate programs don\u2019t actually provide any benefit, it\u2019s still highly unethical, at best, to create training programs, require students to attend them on their own dime, and then change their minds with no warning. \u00a0Are there grounds for a class-action lawsuit? \u00a0I don\u2019t know whether the government is sufficiently insulated from liability. <\/p>\n

And if they end up, in the end, with air traffic controllers who aren\u2019t up to snuff, or if there\u2019s a significantly greater washout rate, it\u2019ll be the American public who suffers.<\/p>\n

But the bottom line is that this is just another example of the capriciousness of government power and bureaucrats\u2019 disregard for the impact of their actions on people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cFAA\u2019s hiring diverts from recruit pipeline; Air traffic control jobs going to general public over college trainees.\u201d That\u2019s the headline in today\u2019s Tribune. \u00a0The story: \u00a0after developing the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative Program in which college students prepare for traffic controller employment by majoring in the subject at college, some 25 years ago, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nIn today's news: the FAA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\""FAA's hiring diverts from recruit pipeline; Air traffic control jobs going to general public over college trainees."That's the headline in today's\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/05\/in-todays-news-the-faa.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In today's news: the FAA\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\""FAA's hiring diverts from recruit pipeline; 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